Adherents.com: Religious Groups in Literature

34,420 citations from literature (mostly science fiction and fantasy) referring to real churches, religious groups, tribes, etc. [This database is for literary research only. It is not intended as a source of information about religion.]

'Ten millions of years earlier,' Spock said. 'Human beings regarded them, as they regarded everything else on the planet, as resources to be exploited. Humans hunted the whale, even after its intelligence had been noted, even after other resources took the place of what humans took from whales. The culture of whales--'

'No one ever proved whales have a culture!' McCoy exclaimed.

'No. Because you destroyed them before you had the wisdom to obtain the knowledge that might form the proof.' McCoy started to object again, but Spock spoke over him. 'The language of the smaller species of cetaceans contain tantalizing hints of a high intellectual civilization. Lost, all lost. In any event, the pressure upon the population was too great for the whales to withstand. The humpback species became extinct in the twenty-first century.' "

"The so-called Songs of the Humpbacked Whales. Just a lot of flubbering mouth-noises. Loud, yes, but extremely crude. It doesn't compare with the New Necropsy. Whales are useful for perfume, pet food, and the occasional girdle, but please don't mistake them for intelligent beings. They're just big basic models.

But my fellow rats are entranced by these huge farts the whales are blowing... "

'The sperm whale has a brain six times that of a man. Only a small part of that brain is used for survival. The rest of it is undoubtedly engaged in thought-forms which exceed anything mankind has yet dreamed of.'

'Sir James, how can we know for certain that the sperm whale actually uses that gigantic brain?'

'Nothing is certain, of course. But computer calculations have indicated that a brain of that size... We've studied the recordings of their music and it expresses emotions which are quite beyond us, really, but deeply stirring nonetheless.' " [More.]

cetacean

United Kingdom

1984

Adams, Douglas. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. New York: Harmony Books (1984); pg. 37.

"There had been a small number of significant letters in the piles of junk... there was also an old letter from Greenpeace, the ecological pressure group to which he occasionally made contributions, asking for help with their scheme to release dolphins and orcas from captivity... " [Other refs., not in DB. The title of the book, in fact, is the last message from the dolphins before they left Earth in the first book in the series.]

"We dug it ourselves, in the Haughs just down there by the river. It's tidal, our river. Did you know? It had dolphins anyway, but our pool lured them in. They like the people and the facilities, like the video conferencing. They like video conferencing, do dolphins. They like being fed and all.

My Dad and I helped make the food. We grind up fish heads on a Saturday at Safeways. It smells rotten to me, but then I'm not an aquatic mammal, am I?... Sick people get first crack at swimming with the dolphins. When Granddad was sick, he'd take me with him. There'd be all this steam coming off the water like in a vampire movie. The dolphins always knew who wasn't right, what was wrong with them. " [More, this page and pg. 524.]

Pg. 208: "The three moved in the direction of a marble fountain; King Alexander the Great at the Court of Queen Hecate of Iberia, with water-nymphs and dolphins. They lifted their faces to the spray. "; Pg. 266: "Across the shivering bridge rolled the sphere, the dolphin-dwarves dragging it to the far side of the island and then jumping into the lake to swim for their lives to the shore... "

The film [Starsea] began with an elegiac illumination of the ancient bond between humans and dolphins, then extended that mythic connection to include a philosophical race of extraterrestrials who had long ago established contact with the intelligent mammals of earth's oceans. That race, according to the plot, had appointed the Cetaceans as benevolent caretakers of humanity until such time as mankind was ready to be welcomed to the galactic family. But near the end of the twentieth century, the dolphins had learned that the mentors of Cygnus IV, whose return they had awaited for millennia, had been destroyed by an interstellar catastrophe. The dolphins then made their true nature and their great history known to humanity, in a moment of simultaneous exhilaration and deep mourning. For the first time, this planet became genuinely whole, a linked community of minds on land and undersea . . . yet more alone in the bleakness of space than ever... "

cetacean

USA

1970

Baxter, Stephen. Voyage. New York: HarperCollins (1996); pg. 42.

"He stepped to the edge of the tank. It was a big blue rectangle, like a swimming pool. T-shirted divers were already moving through the water, playing around the sim like dolphins... "

'She didn't know how she got him in the first place. She and her Maharishi were channeling an Egyptian nobleman and he suddenly appeared, wearing a 'Save the Dolphins' T-shirt. I got the idea the Maharishi was as surprised as she was.' "

"For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. "

"The golden coast hazes down the purling wind. The spray and the dolphins leap and shimmer. Albino dolphins, Atlan creatures. I spent a lifetime yearning for Atlan, the great good stronghold, the last purity, before ever I heard its name. I curse the day I first set foot on it (as Atlan too curses that day when storm and war broke loose) and I hope never to see Atlan again.

"Five hundred years ago, Spock knew, the songs of a thousand thousand humpbacks had crisscrossed beneath earth's oceans. Before the advent of humans in larger numbers upon the seas and more specifically, the invention of the screw propeller, cetacean life-forms had possessed an extraordinary communication network. For millennia the seas had been filled with a complex tapestry of underwater sound, its uncounted strands woven around the planet, such a never-ending, constantly evolving saga. For such they must have been. Enduring anywhere from five to sixty minutes, they were memorized and passed from pod to pd. Old songs were repeated, new songs added, every year. One whale could communicate with another across distances up to twenty thousand kilometers--literally anywhere in the planet's oceans. "

"Now the largest whales, those which frequent those parts of the sea round the Aleutian, Kulammak, and Umgullich islands, have never exceeded the length of sixty yards, if they attain that. " [Many other refs. not in DB.]

In every big city the monster was the latest rage; they sang about it in the coffee houses, they ridiculed it in the newspapers, they dramatized it in the theaters. The tabloids found it a fine opportunity for hatching all sorts of hoaxes. In those newspapers short of copy, you saw the reappearance of every gigantic imaginary creature, from "Moby Dick, " that dreadful white whale from the High Arctic regions, to the stupendous kraken whose tentacles could entwine a 500-ton craft and drag it into the ocean depths. They even reprinted reports from ancient times: the views of Aristotle and Pliny accepting the existence of such monsters, then the Norwegian stories of... Pontoppidan, the narratives of Paul Egede, and finally the reports of Captain Harrington-- whose good faith is above suspicion--in which he claims he saw, while aboard the Castilian in 1857, one of those enormous serpents that, until then, had frequented only the seas of France's old extremist newspaper

"What you believe to be red meat, professor, is nothing other than loin of sea turtle. Similarly, here are some dolphin livers you might mistake for stewed pork. My chef is a skillful food processor who excels at pickling and preserving these various exhibits from the ocean. Feel free to sample all of these foods. Here are some preserves of sea cucumber that a Malaysian would declare to be unrivaled in the entire world, here's cream from milk furnished by the udders of cetaceans, and sugar from the huge fucus plants in the North Sea; and finally, allow me to offer you some marmalade of sea anemone, equal to that from the tastiest fruits. "

"Orc is not an English word. It occurs in one or two places but is usually translated goblin... Orc is the hobbits' form of the name given at that time to these creatures, and it is not connected at all with our orc, ork, applied to sea-animals of dolphin-kind. "

Pg. 45: "He shook his head. Was there no end to the surrealism he'd been subjected to in the last six days? A dolphin wearing scuba gear!

'Hi, man-friends,' said Howard's voice over the loudspeaker on the bridge. George cast a glance at Harry Coin...

'Dead, sleeping, whatever it is they are. I have a whole purpoise horde--most of the Atlantean Adepts--watching them.'

...'It's a talking fish. but why the hell is it wearing an oxygen tank and breathing through a... mask?' "; Pg. 46: "'...Meanwhile, stay out of the way of the Nazis--the protection they're under is particularly aimed at sea animals, since that was the presumed greatest danger to them...' "

"Hagbard Celine, meanwhile, is rushing toward sunken Atlantis to seize some long-buried art works... In the battle between the Leif Erikson and the spider-ships, Hagbard is aided by a dolphin named Howard, leader of the AA (Atlantean Adepts), a delphine secret society. " [Other refs. not in DB.]

"It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on--while all the dolphins had ever done was much about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man--for precisely the same reasons.

Curiously enough, the dolphins had known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for tidbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived. "

"The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the 'Star-Spangled Banner,' but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.

In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioral research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. "

[Lecture given at BYU, Utah by El Hadj Mohammed ben Selim, Professor of Comparative Religion, 1998] "'We must await, not without anxiety, the answers to the following questions: (a) what, if any, are the religious concepts of entities with zero, one, two, or more than two 'parents'; (b) is religious belief found only among organisms that have close contact with their direct progenitors during their formative years?

'If we find that religion occurs exclusively among intelligent analogs of apes, dolphins, elephants, dogs, etc., but not among extraterrestrial computers, termites, fish, turtles, or social amoebae, we may have to draw some painful conclusions. . . . Perhaps both love and religion can only arise among mammals, and for much the same reasons. This is also suggested by a stdy of their pathologies. Anyone who doubts the connection between religious fanaticism and perversion should take a long, hard look at the Malleus maleficarum...' "

"But there were still limits. A fetus could grow only so large... yes, bigger bodies could have accommodated bigger brains via live birth--but much of the additional brain mass would end up being devoted to controlling the larger body. Maybe, just maybe, a whale was as intelligent as a human--but it wasn't more intelligent. Life had apparently reached its ultimate level of complexity. "

"HUMAN BEING You're one. At least, if you aren't, you know you're a Martian or a trained dolphin or Shalmaneser [the artificial intelligence character in the book]. " [Dolphins are not sentient or otherwise fictionally altered in this book, simply highly respected by the author, as shown by two passages.]

[Title of chapter 2: "The House of the Dolphins "] "The dolphins swam into the dining room every evening, just before sunset... Charming though they were, he had to admit that their playfulness was sometimes a nuisance. The wealthy marine geologist who had designed the house had never minded getting wet because he usually wore bathing trunks... But there had been one unforgettable occasion when the entire Board of Regents, in full evening attire... The dolphins had deduced, correctly, that they would get second billing. So the visitor was quite surprised to be greeted by a bedraggled reception committee in ill-fitting bathrobes--and the buffet had been very salty. " [More.]; Pg. 24: "And though he could not yet speak much Human, he already seemed fluent in Dolphin. " [Other refs. not in DB, e.g. pg. 79.]

"NET NEWS DIGESTA group of protestors announced late yesterday that Florida's SeaWorld, the last U.S. entertainment institution to still keep dolphins in captivity, was refusing their requests to try to determine if dolphins also exhibited the soulwave. "

Before she could reach the door, he recited, still staring out in the starlit darkness: ' 'He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole face. . . . If his chest had been a cannon, he would've shot his heart upon it.' '

With an ironic smile, he turned to see her gazing at him in puzzlement. 'What?'

'Moby Dick,' he replied.

She gave in a small, embarrassed grin. 'Actually, I never read it.'

Ahab spent years hunting the white whale that crippled him,' Picard explained. 'A quest for vengeance. And in the end, the whale destroyed him--and his ship.'

"The beasts in the foreground are those that have been exterminated by man or survive only in zoos and natural preserves. The dodo, the blue whale, the passenger pigeon, the quagga, the gorilla, orangutan... "

Pg. 138: "A man stood in the pool. He was naked, and he had no fur. His skin was brown. His long hair was blond. On his back was a tattoo: a complex geometric pattern. It represented the cosmic forces in and around the Grey Whale. It--the whale or rather the pattern on the whale--was the totem of his lodge. Maybe I ought to use his terminology. It was the mandala of his eco-niche. "; Pg. 163: "'...Anyway, I don't believe in demons of fire.' He glanced at the valley. 'It's a good thing I don't. My own protection is too far away. The Grey Whale can't help me here.' " [Some other refs. to the Grey Whale, not in DB.]

[This book is a sequel to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home] "But in its half million years, it had found none. In the waters of hundreds of worlds it had found primitives who held the promise that, in another million years, they might be able to Speak, might become capable of learning the True Language.

The blue world [Earth] the entity had recently departed had held such primitives [whales] for millennia. Time and again it had returned, listening to their evolving story, etching their rudimentary recitations into its crystalline memory, observing, prompting them in the direction of Speech. But then they had fallen silent. No amount of calling, no intensity of prodding, had brought for a response until, finally, the creators' instructions had said: Prepare the world for new life. Whatever the cause of the primitives' extinction, remove it; insure that it will neither recur on this world nor spread to infect other worlds. "

cetacean

world

2800

Roberts, Keith. Kiteworld. New York: Arbor House (1985); pg. 176.

Pg. 176: "She hurried back to the 'Dolphin', undid the small door at the foot of the arch and got her truck... She thought about Master Lorning. His family had owned the 'Dolphin' now for three generations. she didn't know how long that was... She'd scampered back with the truck, sat awhile and brooded on the waste ground opposite the 'Dolphin'... went round the back as soon as the 'Dolphin' opened... "; Pg. 184: "A stone arch spanned the road. Beneath it hung a sign. The Dolphin Tavern. " [More.]

"The ancient Cornish language had also arrested his attention, and he had, I remember, conceived the idea that it was akin to Chaldean, and had been largely derived from the Phoenician traders in tin... "

"'...And now, my dear Watson, I think we may dismiss the matter from our mind and go back with a clear conscience to the study of those Chaldean roots which are surely to be traced in the Cornish branch of the great Celtic speech.' "

Chaldean

world

-445 B.C.E.

Vidal, Gore. Creation. New York: Random House (1981); pg. 77.

"Nebuchadnezzar... in Babylon... He was their last true king. Incidentally, he was of ancient Chaldean stock as is--I am certain as one can be without any proof at all--the family of Spitama. "

Chaldean

world

-445 B.C.E.

Vidal, Gore. Creation. New York: Random House (1981); pg. 282.

Pg. 282: "In those days Xerxes liked to wander about Babylon in disguise. He would wear a Chaldean cloak in such a way that the hood covered the telltale square-cut beard. "; Pg. 318: "Then, standing before the fire-altar, I described to a dozen of my relatives--small, dark Chaldean-looking men... " [Other refs., not in DB.]

Pg. 427: "...carried a gray leather case of bizarre instruments picked from the pockets of wizards and recondite books looted from Chaldean libraries... "; Pg. 447: "They were now nearing that rugged vantage-land from which the Medes and the Persians had swooped own on Assyria and Chaldea... " [Also pg. 472.]

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